Murder in Mumbai by K. D. Calamur Read Free Book Online Page B

confidence.”
    â€œNothing, inspector. That’s all.”
    â€œThank you both for your time,” Gaikwad said, gesturing to the waiter, who brought the bill.
    â€œLet the police department take this,” Gaikwad said. “For your cooperation.”
    He wished he could get another ten minutes with Kohli without the woman present. But that wasn’t to be right now.

Chapter 4
    Had Jay Ganesh ever wanted to escape angry parents, an oppressive spouse, the burden of caste or the trap of poverty, he would have run away to Bombay. It was, he knew, the easiest place in the world to get lost—15 million people, all leaving you alone. That’s why he knew finding Liz Barton’s killer wouldn’t be easy.
    Jay could not help but wonder about Liz Barton’s life. He had often seen Western backpackers trying to walk unobtrusively through the city’s streets, despite their size, gait, and garb. Many of them seemed to be in a trance. It was one thing following the advice of your Lonely Planet guide and going to Haridwar and Hrishikesh for the Kumbh Mela, watching people, each simultaneously an individual and a mass of humanity, but it was something quite different to watch that orchestrated chaos day after day, moment after moment in this city. Most visitors to the country were content to take in the Taj Mahal in Agra, possibly Rajasthan and Delhi, but Bombay was chaos and Bombay could swallow you up without you even realizing it.
Is that
, he wondered,
what happened to this woman?
    Jay remembered a trip he took across America in the late ’90s. It involved little money and many Greyhound buses. He made it a point to sit behind the driver, just so he could be content with a sense of security. In parts of the South or in vast, lonely expanses of the Midwest, it seemed as if he was the only person of color for miles. It was not as if anyone made him conscious of this fact, but in moments of great solitude, your identity often becomes more apparent to you than it ever has in the past, than you ever thought it could.
    The ringing phone broke him out of his reverie.
    â€œDo you have that story ready?” It was Manisha Thakkar, his editor.
    â€œYes. I sent it to you ten minutes ago. I’m trying to work on the Khurana profile.”
    On the ride back from the Taj last night, he and Janet discussed what they had seen and heard. Jay knew he would never be able to persuade Manisha to let him investigate the murder. There was simply too little to go on—“unless you count gossip,” Janet had told him. So they decided that they would together pitch a profile of Kabir Khurana, a man who had been close to the dead woman. It would be a backdoor way to get into the Barton case, and if Jay learned anything in the process, so be it. The ride back to the newsroom was quick—too quick, Jay thought. Somehow, being with Janet seemed natural. For perhaps the only time in his life, he hoped for traffic.
    He’d spent the morning Googling Kabir Khurana, to see if there was anything other than the usual fawning profiles. He tried to look for personal information, but little was available besides what was already known: the son of a famous nationalist leader; educated at Harrow and Oxford, where he was a cricketing blue; against his father’s wishes, an MBA from Cornell; returned to India and instead of joining politics as was expected of him, took over the long-ignored, much-ailing family business, which in a matter of two decades he turned into a global player in mining, energy, and telecommunications; spoken of reverentially by both his allies and his rivals; keeps a very private profile; whispers about his fondness for women, but nothing ever in the open; is known to do
The Times
cryptic crossword every day.
    Many of the profiles of Khurana that Jay did find were based on interviews with former college classmates who knew him decades ago. If the articles were to be believed, Khurana